Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wbk2r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-10T22:52:12.845Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Carbon onions and spheroidal carbon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2010

Peter J. F. Harris
Affiliation:
University of Reading
Get access

Summary

Nevertheless, the most interesting question is whether, 500 years

after Columbus reached the West Indies, flat carbon has gone the

way of the flat Earth.

Harry Kroto, Nature, 22 October 1992

When one browses through the carbon literature, spheroidal forms of carbon crop up again and again. Examples include carbon black, mesophase pitch and the graphitic particles in spherulitic graphite cast iron, all of which constitute technologically important materials. Despite many years of research, however, the structure and formation of these particles remains inadequately understood. Prior to the discovery of the fullerenes, models of spheroidal carbon particles had tended to involve assemblies of flat graphene fragments, which seems inherently unsatisfactory. The discovery of C provides us with a new paradigm for spheroidal carbon, and the time seems ripe to take a fresh look at spheroidal carbon in all its forms.This chapter will consider the evidence that fullerene-like elements may be present in the wellknown forms of spheroidal carbon mentioned above. though, a discussion is given of the most recently discovered form of spheroidal carbon: carbon onions.

Carbon onions

Discovery

The synthesis of carbon onions in 1992, like so many discoveries in fullerene science, was serendipitous.The Brazilian electron microscopist Daniel Ugarte, working at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, had been examining carbon nanoparticles filled with gold and with lanthanum oxide, and decided to investigate the effect of electron irradiation on these structures (8.1). In the case of the encapsulated gold clusters, the irradiation caused the gold to be expelled from the carbon nanoparticle, while at the same time inducing a change in the nanoparticle's structure from faceted to rounded.

Type
Chapter
Information
Carbon Nanotubes and Related Structures
New Materials for the Twenty-first Century
, pp. 235 - 265
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×